There have been a lot of films made from novels which were acceptable as long as one hadn’t read the book. There have even been turns better than the books they were adapted from. But Doctor Zhivago (Empire) is one of those rare film adaptations which, unless you have already read the book, makes you wonder why anyone ever bothered to make the film at all.

I mean this quite seriously. The novel has been reduced to the love story of Lara and Zhivago, and it’s not a terribly interesting one. Goodness knows, it was not for the plot as such that one liked “Doctor Zhivago.” The hero of the book may have been Zhivago, but the heroine was Moscow, and the revolution held the all-important role of catalyst.

In the film the revolution is reduced to a series of rather annoying occurrences; getting firewood, finding a seat on a train, and a lot of nasty proles being tiresome. Whatever one thinks of the Russian Revolution it was certainly more than a series of consumer problems. At least it was to Zhivago himself. The whole point of the book was that even though Zhivago disapproved of the course the revolution took, he had approved of it in principle. Had he not, there would have been no tragedy.

As for Moscow, well, one street has been beautifully reconstructed in Spain. This is where all the rich people live; the poorer characters share a back alley. The result is to reduce Pasternak’s heroine to the status of a one–street Mid–western town.

When the Russians and the Americans finally succeed in renegotiating their cultural agreements treaty, they definitely ought to include a clause whereby each country agrees to abstain from filming the other’s novels. MGM’s “Doctor Zhivago” is about as Russian as a Soviet adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” would be American. It just can’t be done – especially when a novel is set in a period as recent as the past 50 years. This, for the simple reason that films do exist of the revolution. We know what Moscow looked like, we know what the revolutionaries looked like – and they didn’t look like anything out of this film.

David Lean can proclaim – a little pretentiously, I think – that the “Russian Revolution has not yet been truly depicted in a motion picture,” but Eisenstein and Dovzhenko did have a crack at it. Doubtless theirs was a one-sided view but they did have the great advantage of filming it with people who looked like Russians and in places which were Russian.

Even if one leaves aside the question of verisimilitude, there remains the problem of the screenplay. Whether the blame for this goes entirely to Robert Bolt or must be shared with David Lean, I do not know. Even granting the enormous difficulty of adapting such a long and complex book, I do not see how a worse job could have been done. Jack–rabbiting along in fits and starts, it gives one the feeling that the book has been arbitrarily chopped up into an irrelevant series of scenes, attempting an unsuccessful compromise between intimacy and the epic.

The acting can only be judged in terms of the Bolt conception of the roles: in these terms, it is quite good, except perhaps for Alec Guinness, who is lit and made up like Fu Manchu, and for Ralph Richardson’s excessively English characterisation: “Oh dear, not another purge.” As for the other technical credits: the photography is excellent – in the best picture postcard tradition, but the music is one more case of “Tinkle, tinkle, Monsieur Jarre.” The big theme may gain popularity as the “Zhivago Waltz” but composer Maurice Jarre’s balalaikas and harpsichords effectively rob even the landscapes of their natural God–given grandeur. To sum up: “Gone With the Wind” was a lot better.